Most of us had never heard of retired teacher Mary Lou Bruner before her bizarre and nonsensical Facebook posts thrust a usually quiet State of Board of Education race into the national spotlight.

Hopefully, now that the retired teacher has lost in a GOP runoff to Lufkin school board president Keven Ellis, none of us will ever have to write about her running for a political race again.

It’s truly frightening that someone who believes the extremist things she does -- and had no qualms about originally posting them for all the world to see -- actually led three candidates in the GOP primary before voters woke up and saw her for who she was and told her to take a seat.

What was more unbelievable to me, though, is that even after her views came to light, she still won in Kaufman and Rockwall counties. (District 9 covers parts of those counties and East Texas.)

Does that mean that hundreds of voters in those counties viewed her as a viable person to serve on a board that sets curriculum standards and approves textbooks for 5.2 million Texas schoolchildren? Or could it mean that voters didn’t do their homework before they voted?

Either of those scenarios should make us quake in our boots.

Bruner’s greatest hits are well-known by now:

She ridiculously wrote that President Obama once supported a drug habit by working as a gay male prostitute. She said dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark. She said the Democratic Party “had JFK killed because the socialists and Communists in the party didn’t want a conservative president.” She asserted that Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush wants to turn the Alamo over to the United Nations.

There were many, many more.

These aren’t political leanings, this is wackiness. Bruner would have been a train wreck on the state board with influence over what our children are required to learn. Our editorial board spelled out why Ellis made a far superior choice here. Thank goodness, clear-minded Republican voters agreed.

If any campaign highlighted the importance of making sure we vote and get involved in the political process, this was it.